


A Girl with a Badge

by Goonlalagoon



Series: A Boy with a Badge [2]
Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: But there is friendship and growth and moving forwards, F/F, George goes to the Academy AU, It's George so of course everything is tragic, Jack dies AU, Liam lives AU, Once again a lot of people make at least a brief appearance, That...appears to be a theme for these AUs, Why yes I did set myself St George's day as a deadline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-27 11:25:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14424408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: The second name on the door read ‘L. Jones, Mage’, and George raised a cautioiusly curious eyebrow. She knew an L. Jones who had sparks spilling from his fingers and his lips, but he was weeks of travel away and had a certain scoffing disrespect for the Academy. to be fair, so did she, but here she was. She knocked politely, and gently pushed the door open when there was no response.The room was empty - evidently her new roommate was out - but it was clear which half of the room was occupied. George didn’t have much with her, so wound up lying on her well worn bedroll staring at the ceiling. She sort of felt like she should go to the Library, bury herself in books, but there was a kind of tightness in her chest she had to remind herself how to breathe through first.She was still remembering to breathe when the door clicked open. George sat up and twisted, and her breath caught in her throat all over again.“Hi. I’m Laney Jones,” the tall, dark skinned girl smiled politely, precisely, “and you must be Georgiana - I met Rupert in the quad.”“Just Ana, please.”“Ana? Okay. Well, pleased to meet you, Ana Jones.”(Observation #1: her smile is something practised)





	A Girl with a Badge

The second name on the door read ‘L. Jones, Mage’, and George raised a cautioiusly curious eyebrow. She knew an L. Jones who had sparks spilling from his fingers and his lips, but he was weeks of travel away and had a certain scoffing disrespect for the Academy. to be fair, so did she, but here she was. She knocked politely, and gently pushed the door open when there was no response.The room was empty - evidently her new roommate was out - but it was clear which half of the room was occupied. George didn’t have much with her, so wound up lying on her well worn bedroll staring at the ceiling. She sort of felt like she should go to the Library, bury herself in books, but there was a kind of tightness in her chest she had to remind herself how to breathe through first.

She was still remembering to breathe when the door clicked open. George sat up and twisted, and her breath caught in her throat all over again.

“Hi. I’m Laney Jones,” the tall, dark skinned girl smiled politely, precisely, “and you must be Georgiana - I met Rupert in the quad.”

“Just Ana, please.”

“Ana? Okay. Well, pleased to meet you, Ana Jones.”

(Observation #1: her smile is something practised)

It was less than a week before George was absolutely sure that L. Jones, Mage, was the young Lanetia she had heard about from L. Jones, Vigilante. It was over a month before she told Laney she knew her brother, because that was how long it took for the letter to reach the mountains and a fat packet of replies to come back via Sez.

George liked Sez, despite (or perhaps because of) the scornful glances the woman threw at her Academy jacket the one time George wore it down into Rivertown (her mountain jacket had been in the wash, and she had made herself wear the Academy one because she _was_ an Academy student, and if she was going to be ashamed of it she shouldn’t have joined). She knew enough women who had their own kingdoms spilling around their feet and hands to recognise the way Sez was dancing at the metaphorical heart of Rivertown.

Four letters came back from the bakery. Three of them were for George - Liam’s response and well wishes, Bea’s careful updates and loving concern, Bidi’s scrawled portraits. The last was for Laney, so George took her out to somewhere there were no prying Bureau ears to tell her about the Pied Piper.

She didn’t tell her about the Dragon Slayer. Liam was the Pied Piper, and Laney was his sister; it was his call to decide what she should be told, what parts of him she could be trusted with. George wanted just to be A. Jones, Sage, for a while, until she remembered how to stand without her red haired shadow, until she went back to finish the business she hadn’t begun. The Academy was her respite, her compromise, torn between the things in her life she hadn’t finished and the things she had never gotten to start. Laney didn’t have the right to that, not yet.

Sez came in through the fish shop door while Laney was re-reading her brother’s letter, and spared an acknowledging nod for George. George nodded back and picked at the plate of chips before her, seemingly engrossed in her meal and waiting for her roommate to be done reading. But George had fixed walls while Suzie and Rosie made plans, had leaned against trees while every eye turned to Marian for guidance, had spent years sitting at the table in the bakery where Bea ran her resistance. George didn’t have to look like she was paying attention to know this little shop was the heart of something, and that it was growing. She didn’t have to look like she was paying attention to know it was going to be something good.

Because George had taken to spending her spare weekend hours curled up in a booth at Sally-Anne’s, she noticed Rupert slipping in like clockwork. She didn’t wave him over, or go over to say hi, for all of that first year and a bit, but she watched the easy familiarity with which he talked to Sally, some Rivertown fellow in a bowler hat who tended to drop by regularly as well, and Sez whenever she was around. Sometimes she caught herself watching and dragged her eyes back to her notes. She didn’t have to keep a wary eye on everyone here. She was a student, a sage - she was supposed to have eyes only for her books.

But when she heard from an exhausted, adrenaline fuelled Laney early in their second year that there had been a hold-up during their study meeting, George heard her out and noted her page. She knocked gently on Rupert’s door, hesitant, and wished she knew how to be kind about things.  
“Hi?”  
“Hi. Laney said the fish shop got attacked. Sally and Sez okay?” His eyebrows rose, then he nodded. George relaxed a little. “If they need help patching up, I’ve done my fair share of helping mend walls.” He blinked, then sighed and said he’d ask for her. She nodded, and went back to her book.

George’s study group had camped out in the hall, at one of the long benches they ate at every meal. There had been an argument between their mage and their hero over deadlines and organisation, and nothing else of note.

She found Leaf early in his first year, because she was trying so hard not to be a fighter but had a knife that came to hand quicker than thought when a boot scuffed the ground behind her. George had been defending herself and others so long that walking away wasn’t an option. When she hauled Leaf out of the first confrontation she found him in, she nodded blithely through Heads’ lecture and then dragged the kid off to the stables. He greeted the horses by name as she shoved hay into rough pallets to give him something soft to land in. George would always hate the way her first ingrained instinct was to violence, but she would always hate seeing children (innocents, the defenceless) hurt more. Leaf had a bright, burning determination that hit something deep in her chest, a Forest accent that was almost what she expected to hear from someone who believed that deeply in heroes, who trusted that freely.

Francis Uyeda tracked her down not long after, eyes steady and sharp, noting the way that his year mate was gaining regular bruises that didn’t have bullies and scoldings attached. George eyed the combat spec warily, but he wasn’t condescending and he wasn’t threatening, so she let him stay. Leaf bounced up the stair and paused when he saw their new arrival.  
“Uh, hi there, Red. Come for some extracurricular training too?” Francis smiled, just a different kind of solemn scowl if you didn’t know how to look, and shrugged at George. She blinked back at him, assessing.  
“That works, I suppose.”

It started with just the three of them, until George mentioned it to the guide in her study group - Heather had seemed taciturn right up until George had mentioned the cultural importance of potatoes, at which point she became a font of information and academic tangents. Heather showed up with the bubbly blonde sage George tended to sit next to in most classes (several of their instructors found alphabetical order easiest, possibly so they didn’t have to bother learning their names and so could focus on other, more interesting things). Gloria marched directly over to George and poked her fiercely in the shoulder, demanding mock indignantly to know why _Ana tells_ Heather _about her super special fight club after a few study sessions, but does she tell me? I see where your loyalties lie_.

George rocked back on her heels, then settled her stance, hands loose in her pockets.  
“Well, Heather _did_ spend all of yesterday afternoon telling me about spores. What can I say, Gloria, there’s just no competition.” Gloria paused, finger waving indignantly at nothing while she considered.  
“What kind of spores?”

When the squeaky Sage from Laney’s study group went missing, George was one of the first to notice. She had exchanged few words with Grey after the first morning she had carried her books and papers over to the desk in the library he had already colonised and asked if she could claim the second half, but George was a creature of habits and patterns.

 _Grey went to a bookstore_ , she reminded herself as ice slipped down her spine, _the pipsqueak will be happily distracted for hours._

But it got darker and darker, and Grey hadn’t dropped by the library to crow over purchases or pick up the books he had left under George’s watchful eye, so she set her pen aside and went to check if he was back. She met Laney outside his closed door, and cold settled in her stomach.

They hadn’t had much to do with one another, but George was a woman of patterns. She had noted the way Grey’s fingers twitched, the waving of his hands, the way he fell into speaking (or muttering corrections to himself) whenever magework and the Elsewhere came up in class. She had noticed with quiet suspicion the way that days when the mages had all been laid out in the throes of an Elsewhere storm, Grey would either skip the library or be quieter than usual, giving simple, snappish answers to questions instead of going off on long tangential rambles meant to distract and deflect.

“We should ask Sez,” George muttered, already walking. “If she doesn’t know where he is she’ll know someone who will.” Laney hurried to catch up, questions locked behind her teeth as she eyed her roommate. Laney had been slipping out of their room at odd times and back in with suspicious cuts and bruises and a light in her eyes that George recognised for weeks, now, but George hadn’t asked to join. She’d invited Laney along to their self-defence classes, but Laney had thought her roommate was interested only in helping kids not get bullied, so she hadn’t pushed. Laney didn’t like asking for things she wanted if she wasn’t absolutely sure she would get them, and that included friendship.

Rupert had gone to check the bookstores, so it was just George and Laney who slipped into a building they thought would be empty. George had her suspicions rolling in her gut, so when she blinked herself back into awareness and catalogued her surroundings, she wasn’t surprised that Grey was pale and cold, a crack in the universe tucked into the vulnerable hollow of his neck.

She watched Laney carefully and made a casual, wry comment about how Laney’s brave face clearly wasn’t something to be trifled with, and watched as one of the most composed people she knew tried - ineffectively - to pretend she was feeling sick to her stomach. George picked the lock, wishing for her spear (something with reach) slightly less than for her shield, a dull roaring in her ears where Jack’s flippant commentary would have been a comforting buzz.

The slavers went down quickly, now that George was certain and not pulling her punches or trying to convince herself she was just paranoid and twitchy. Grey grumbled and glared at Laney’s confusion as the story came spilling out - well. As _a_ story fell grudgingly from his hunched shoulders. George eyed the gaps in it with the scepticism of someone who knew just how difficult it was to spirit a mage away from the mountains, particularly one who suffered quite that much when the Elsewhere roared and tugged at their bones.

“Your sister must be quite something, to pull that off,” she said aloud.

“She is,” said Grey, and George watched the way his eyes lit up while his shoulders curled further around his ears.

The next time Sez asked for their help in Rivertown, Laney asked Ana to join them. George paused, page unturned, and considered it. She wanted out - she knew that, she’d wanted out of that life since she started, but she never seemed able to walk away from it. She had been so tired, in the mountains, of the weight of a dragon on her shoulders and the endless work to be done. But she missed it, a little, too. Not the weight or the harsh necessity, but the way people looked at her like she was useful. She missed the surety, but she hadn’t been sure of anything since Jack fell.

Rupert didn’t bat an eyelid when she arrived, but looked mournfully at Laney, vaguely reproachful.  
“I wasn’t expecting anyone else this time, and I don’t have anything I think Ana will like.” George shrugged, the thin sliver of a knife through her belt still glimmering faintly gold to eyes that could see, and took the weighted cosh he handed her. She swung it absently to get a feel for the weight of it, and pulled a face.  
“It’ll do.”

(Observation #1. Rupert isn’t used to having two allies. It’s not just that he doesn’t trust me to watch this flank, yet, he’s forgetting I’m here altogether. Reasonable, but will need to change; #2. I will need a shield next time)

They filled her in on some of the hunts that she’d missed, and she frowned when they told her about the curse diagram. Grey shrunk and shrugged and stayed studiously quiet, but she collared him later. He grumbled and groused about it, like she’d think less of him for caring, and eventually muttered that he’d already gone to warn them to be more careful. He mentioned the kid’s name, in passing - Grey had never been very good at thinking about what knowledge could be dangerous once he pressed it into someone’s hands.

George blinked slowly, and told him with a deliberate level of offhanded calm that he’d just given her enough information to track the family down with relative ease. Grey squawked and gaped, then hid frantically deeper into the book in his hands.

She didn’t track them down, though. Jack had never been able to remember the names of their rescues; he’d recall the pattern on one’s dress, the weak joke that a kid had laughed at, the story Liam had managed to wheedle out of another about a barn and a cow and a badly timed hiccough. But George had a list in the back of her head, with the names of everyone she’d saved on it. She could look at every pin on Bea’s map since she and Jack had walked through the bakery doors and match them to a name and number.

George remembered a little seer named Elaine, eyes wide, face drawn, the slight weight heavy in her arms and on her chest. She couldn’t recall any stories about her, though, because Liam remembered only the loss, after. Jack hadn’t gotten the chance to remember anything about her at all.

When the curse came, poisoning her luck and sending her crashing to the floor, they half carried her to Sez’s mother. The hag took one look at her, at her hands clean except for the smudge of ink on her fingers, and hissed, long and low. George didn’t flinch, because it was almost a relief to meet someone else who saw that stain as a crime. Rue didn’t bother throwing accusations at her, hauling out a selection of her otherwise unseen scars, just turned on her daughter to demand to know what horror had been brought into her house.

“Ana only killed the ones I sent her after.” Sez was firm, standing tall, defiant - and wrong. George’s tongue was heavy in her mouth, and she couldn’t bring herself to explain that she didn’t deserve this defence, just looked at Rue, steady, and tried to remember to breathe. When she spoke, she cut through a sentence from Rupert she hadn’t heard. Another unasked for defendant, who even without knowing what stains were on her fingertips was insistent that she had done good.

“I never went after anyone - any _thing_ \- that wasn’t hurting people. I’ve never killed anything that didn’t try to kill m- to kill _someone_ first.” She watched Rue’s face twist, then freeze, as the hag parsed through her mountain-born accent, her age, and what could lead someone to kill a dragon and then claim it was _needed_. The hag ran clawed fingertips over the palms of her hands, and shook her head.

“Your luck’s been poisoned.” George went still, remembering a boy who’d practically danced between bullets, wondering who this had been designed for in the first place. “Not that you had much of _that_ to begin with, by the looks of things”

George closed her eyes, bone tired with more than just the curse. She remembered blood spilling over her hands, burning (branding), the way purple flowers made her flinch, the way rain slicked mountain walls haunted her nightmares. She remembered forgiveness, unasked for, still unearned, given to her like a blessing. She remembered, cold and distant, what people did with things that were handed to them freely. She remembered blood on her hands, but she remembered blisters and ash ground into every crease of them, too.

“You save people,” Jack had said once, and meant _you_ _save me_.

 _But I didn’t_ , thought George.

The rifle retort had echoed off of stone walls. If it had been aimed at his shock of red hair the bullet would have missed, but Jack had lunged for Georgie’s back, thoughtless, the way he had been guarding her already well-guarded flank for years.

The universe loved Jack, but Jack had loved George.

George had been an old soul on a battlefield a harsh month longer than him. She didn’t need to fumble for a pulse, fingers slipping in blood from the gaping exit wound, and so she didn’t. She just grabbed the shell shocked child up from Jack’s now slack arms and ran, gasping for breath on air that tasted of ash.

She had almost forgotten what that was like - she had begun to grow used to the way air seemed almost clean when it filled her lungs.

When fire and chaos broke out in Rivertown, George was standing at the gates, looking out at the mountains. Laney rested a casual elbow on her shoulder, guns strapped to her sides from her interrupted practice, patient and calm. George had been twitchy for the weeks since Rue’s healing, her mind full of luck and sickness, desperate for news. But she wasn’t leaving - George had walked away from few things in her life, and this badge wasn’t one of them.

She still hated the Bureau but she loved the parts of it that loved her; the soft sunlight on the back of her chair in the library, the stern arches of the dining hall, the twist of Grey’s nose and the soft affection in Rupert’s sighs, the way Laney’s smile was nothing like her brother’s but just as fierce. George would earn her badge, and she would move on.

But it was hard to sleep, leftover adrenaline in her veins, fear on her heels, so she had taken to nighttime rambles along the safer streets. Laney had been out at the shooting range, and fallen into step when she saw her roommate heading out. Even on the safer streets it was wise to have company. They were turning to return to their room when the explosion came, and they shared a single resigned glance before going to investigate. They woke in the dim light of a basement, and exchanged a look filled with a much more furious brand of resignation.

George was too short to hide anything Laney was doing unless they were at opposite ends of a field. She didn’t know what Laney’s plan was, but she trusted her when asked for a distraction, so she tackled their careless watcher, shoulder low into his gut, hands empty and hating it. There had been a knife at her belt for all of the past two years of quiet libraries and laughing dining halls. Her hand had dropped to it without thought every time someone scraped a boot on the ground, and she had hated that too.

Laney broke the world open and stepped through, and George flinched more from that spill of gold than she did from the impact of knuckles against her chin.

George had had few friends, in her still short life. Her childhood playmates had burnt up, unseen and half-forgotten, left, and she had stayed few places long enough to make new ones. Jack had trailed her until she knew all of his sharp edges and bright perspectives, until she trusted him with all of her deepest fractures and fragile hopes, and then she had lost him.

Laney slipped into golden fire, and George wanted to scream - but there was someone with rough fists and angry eyes in front of her, and George was familiar with few things the way she was accustomed to fighting for the right to live. When Laney burnt the door open, George was leaning against the wall, panting, knuckles bruised and bleeding. She ran absent fingers over those red-brown tracks as they ran for the Academy, mourning the way they had been clean of anything but ink just an hour before.

The most beautiful thing George had ever known was her dragon. The fire demon was almost as glorious, and it burned with the same fierce gold. She had mourned the great creature for years, now, had been given her absolution - the demon bore down on her with shrieks of fury and mockery, and for a moment George wondered if this was her judgement, finally come to pass.

But Laney had gone to close the rift. Rupert was crumpled on the floor, and Grey - Grey was a _child_ , helpless in his warded circle, a waiting sacrifice to a thing he had no defence against. George shifted her grip on the sword Rupert had picked out for her, months before, and wished for her spear as she watched her enemy approach. She didn’t tell it she had known things greater and more terrible. George had been given a title, but it wasn’t one she wanted to claim even in defiance, so she made no declarations. She just killed it, and wondered if they’d burden her with a legend for this, too.

There was no golden cloak to give up in exchange for a scrawny sage with an ink-stained nose and flailing hands, but George threw herself into the rift after him anyway. She hadn’t helped him escape the mountains - but he was a mountain child, and she knew about mountain children who burned up in golden fires. She fell into nothing and everything, and reached for something she couldn’t name until she could haul them both home again.

Thorne had eyed Ana with interest when he first met her, then dismissed her from consideration. He was on the lookout for misfits who could be formed into something, people who needed him and people who would therefore appreciate his interest and advice (Laney was a _very_ good actress). George wasn’t exactly typical League material, and he liked the way she was quiet and vicious in every schoolyard fight he’d heard of, but she’d scowled and said she wanted to go to the university and study things. She’d told him a lot about potatoes when he asked what she was studying, and he’d promptly lost interest. It would be months before he realised that this quiet, stubbornly bookish girl who looked at people like she was cataloguing them was the Dragon Slayer.

They didn’t give Ana Jones a legend to her name, but they started saying Laney was the Lady of the Lake reborn. Laney wrote to her brother about it, amused, flattered, and embarrassed. Liam wrote something back about talking when she had books written about her. George scrawled a postscript onto Laney’s reply saying that she was going to write one - “I’ll team up with Laney’s sage and write it - The Better Jones Sibling, maybe, or Jones 2.0 - we’ll send you a signed copy when it’s done”

The next letter home she would write alone. It would be a blunt missive, because George didn’t know how to put her kindness into words, in voice or in writing. She would tell Liam that the slavers had Laney. She didn’t tell him how, but she said Laney had an escape route for herself planned - but to watch out, just in case. She gave it to Sez and slumped in a corner of Sally-Anne’s. She had woken that morning to an empty room and bound wrists, groggy headed and furious, and been halfway through sawing through the knots when a concerned Rupert broke through the door to see why they weren’t responding to his polite knocks.

The journey back to the mountains was a homecoming of sorts, if George had allowed herself to believe in homes. She recognised paths and vistas, inns whose stables she knew better than their kitchens, the scowling of Bureau law enforcement officers who glanced straight over her. Sure, she was golden haired and battle scarred - but she was small, female, and had her nose stuck in a book whenever they glanced her way, a shiny grey badge neatly on her pocket.

They were a particularly unusual League - one Hero and two Sages - but the Rangers had been unusually insistent. “Lots of paperwork to be doing up there, and we’ve been meaning to update our maps, so this is a good team for it”, Sarge had said, scowling, and Heads had peered at him with some puzzlement but a long-earned trust.

Between them, George and Rupert were making headway on the paperwork. George updated the maps too, though with a certain level of intentional vagueness about the parts she’d rather the Bureau didn’t poke around in too much (Thorne would patiently update his versions with the detail accumulated from intel from Spider and his own occasional undercover trips up to Challenge. He would smile a little smugly over the hazy, unexplored areas that Ana Jones left blank. Thorne liked to think he knew more than everyone around him)

Grey peered over his fellow sage’s shoulder and made muttered comments, and George patiently noted them down. In the back of her mind, the list of observations about _S. Grey_ grew a little longer, evidence for a case she was only waiting to be confirmed. His cartographic observations grew more frequent, more detailed, more aware of information you simply couldn’t know from looking around from the main path, and George was certain she could pinpoint the epicentre of Grey’s geography. She said nothing, just idly tried to track which route this mountain child had used when he fled by tracing the edges of his knowledge.

A lot had happened in the mountains over the two years George had been away. She didn’t know all of it, but she had traded letters with Bea and Liam throughout their time apart. If she had been Jack, Liam would have skimmed over the lives he was saving. Bea would have omitted more details than just those not safe to put on paper from her reports. George would have lived through another siege at Challenge and never mentioned it. Jack would have been out of the loop, because he needed to be out from under the weight of it to breathe, because they knew he would take every hint that they were still fighting as a guilt, a failing, a flaw. George needed to remember she could breathe through it, that she could walk away and find other, brighter parts of herself; she couldn’t not know every detail it was safe to tell her. She had lost too much because she let danger outside of her immediate vicinity drift to the back of her mind.

When Laney settled down by their fire, telling them she thought she wouldn’t be going back this time, George poked Grey awake and told him to see if he could get the tracking spell pulled off of Laney. He grumpily told her it was only a ‘look here’ locater, but she insisted on relocating them anyway, sleep patterns be damned. Rupert looked pained, but it was Grey who groused the whole time. Laney settled herself on her saddle and rode next to George, steadily working her way through the dried fruit and rations bars that Rupert had pressed urgently into her hands.

“So, where to now?” George gave her a sidelong glance. There was a hope glimmering in Laney’s eyes that George knew she was privileged to be allowed to see.  
“Figure it’s time you met your sister-in-law, Jones.” Laney didn’t try to hide her grin, and this was a gift too, earned over long study sessions and tracking Things, steady hands on bandages and stitches, shared jokes and co-written letters, nights of listening to each other’s breathing from the other bunk.

George led them to a small village nestled in a valley. There was smoke curling comfortably from the bakery’s chimney, and Bidi ran to meet them with a delighted screech that made Grey wince and cover his ears. Laney paused, uncertain, watching the familiar way George’s arms curled around that small frame, the press of a pale forehead to one only a shade lighter than Laney’s own, hair twisted back in a style Laney’s fingers could weave in her sleep. Bea followed her daughter out more sedately to smile softly at George, and to open her arms wide to a hesitant Laney. Rupert and Grey hung back, bewildered but trusting, to be invited into the Baker’s domain.

Liam wasn’t home; his return was heralded by a lilting whistle that hit something in Laney’s chest with a joy so fierce it burned. George pressed her hands more firmly around her mug, chest alight with the same joy and mind clouding with the same fears. _It had been so long_. Liam stumbled to a halt in the doorway, staring at the unfamiliar faces around his table.

George was the most familiar of them, but there were shadows missing from beneath her eyes, and a set to her shoulders that wasn’t as tense as it had been when last they met. His delighted eyes slid from her to Laney when his sister stood, and they stood frozen. When he had last seen Laney, she had still been small enough for him to lift with relative ease. Rupert gave Laney a tiny, discreet nudge, and she threw herself forwards into her brother’s arms.  
“You _left._ ”  
“I was always going to come home, Lane. I just got…”  
_Married?_ _”  
“_ Well, yeah, that too.”

George snorted with laughter, echoed by Bea as she returned to the kitchen after putting Bidi to bed. Rupert politely concentrated on eating his snow cookie without getting sugar all over the place (a failed mission). Grey stared around in confusion. Laney had taken the secrecy of her brother’s life seriously, and they had not met the Seeress to have her throw knowledge in their faces, trying to split friendships along the lines of their secrets.

Samuel Graves looked at the way Laney was clutching a man with her skin, her nose, the way he had said _home_. Laney had told them stories about her brother, the way he whistled up magic, and the pieces clicked into place. Grey didn’t go quiet when he was scared, unless there were guns and knives involved, unless he needed to hide something other than his self. When he was scared, Grey went sharp, spiked, and oblivious - but this was _Laney_. This was a girl who had masks to match his, throwing them aside as she laughed at her brother’s presence. Grey muttered something about _unnecessary levels of sap_ , and curled up with a book from his pack, hiding from the thoughts in his own head. Rupert pushed a glass of water closer to him, and politely helped George and Bea clear the table.

Ana had told none of them who she was, not even Laney. When Liam turned to her and called her _George_ , it was the first time any of her Academy friends had heard the name. She did not feel guilty. Her name had echoes, legends, a far reaching shadow, and she had been in hostile territory. She would not feel guilty for not telling them about the Dragon Slayer; she had told them about the parts of her that mattered.

Laney was brimming with delight. Grey was terrified and hiding in plain view. Rupert went out to chop wood for Bea, guilt twisting his stomach in knots. He had known George was hiding things. He had thought he had let her be.

They had all been hiding things - Rupert had seen Grey’s shoulders not struggling under a pack eye shouldn’t have been able to lift, the slight smudge of gun-smoke and oil on Laney’s fingertips - and he had said nothing, left spaces and spoken softly around their edges. He had noted that George knew a battlefield in ways an Academy sage shouldn’t, the years of experience in every block, strike and twisting escape she walked the stable loft through, and he had let her be - except. He had written essays on the Dragon Slayer, tactics and reports, strategies and legends. So had George. They had discussed their key points, listened to the same lectures, anecdotes, and debates. He wasn’t sure, now, that he hadn’t been hurting her, with every hero worshipful point he’d made, every delightedly recounted story from the Rangers’ tactical reports. If she had been trying to walk away, and he kept reminding her - he had thought he was letting her be.

Inside, Bea was going over her map with George. There were clusters of pins that George didn’t know the names or numbers behind, and she eyed them curiously, tallying them up. There was a list in the back of her mind, with the names of everyone she had saved on it. They didn’t get added to the end of it, as Bea dropped short summaries and recaps out into the warm air for her, because they were not lives she had saved. But they were lives. They were people who were still living. They were people who were worth fighting for, the blood on her knuckles and soul. 

There was a flag raised higher up the valley, to show that someone wanted to speak to them without coming down to the village. In the morning, George rose early to help Bea with the day’s bread, comfortable silence strung out between them. Grey stumbled in hours later, and barely hid a flinch as he remembered who exactly he was grumbling a greeting at. In the back of George’s mind, another observation was carefully noted down as she murmured a greeting. Liam slipped in soon after, whistling, to fill the room with stories George had missed living.

The cave up the hill was empty when they arrived, but George didn’t flinch when a throat was cleared politely behind them. She would have waited, hidden, until they had arrived as well, if their roles were reversed. Liam turned with a smile. Laney blinked, slow and surprised, as she turned to Thorne. 

George watched, leaning against the cold rock wall, and thought _we’re not the only ones surprised._ Thorne was peering at them, hidden behind a bushy beard and pedlar’s clothes, and he hadn’t expected them to be there. Liam started to speak, and spluttered himself to silence when Laney beat him to it. Thorne beamed at Laney, paternal, praising, and dismissive of everyone except for her and her brother. He was glancing between them, delighted at his little discovery. 

He asked Liam, casual, before leaving, if there was any word from the Dragon Slayer yet. George leaned against the wall and didn’t let anyone see the shiver straining to roll down her spine at the possessive way her title fell from those lips.

“Not a whisper,” Liam said regretfully, not a hint of a lie on his face. “We’ll see you at Challenge.”

  
The road to the woods was treacherous. When bandits struck, George didn’t call for Jack - she was too familiar, still, with the soft pad of his bare feet on red dirt to misplace Laney’s quiet boot-falls onto his ghost. But Laney still lowered her gun with hands that wanted to tremble, and flinched from her brother’s old jokes. Laney had not spent years fighting bandits and slavers with Liam - the gallows humour tripping off his tongue was as foreign to her as the good mountain stew the night before had been. She had never known her brother in anything but peace.

Bureau goons weren’t welcome in the Merry Men’s domain, aside from a few old friends in the Rangers. George they shook their heads over and squinted at, wary but loyal, grudgingly accepting. Laney was met with raised eyebrows and three separate suggestions that she was actually Bidi. She rolled her eyes and peeled off to shoot targets, waving a stiff, shy Rupert away for being a picture perfect Bureau hero. George sat with her back against a tree and breathed deep as Liam traded stories with Little, reciting old ones for a wide eyed Grey. When he started on their trip to find dragons, she snickered and pushed a few pages of notebook paper and a pencil within reach of her fellow sage’s twitching fingers. 

The mossy ground beneath her bedroll was familiar, the curving branches overhead a pattern against the stars she knew from older nights. The rumble of Little’s voice in the morning was familiar too, and she stayed still for a minute, eyes closed. There were other voices she expected to hear, nowadays, and she let herself rest for a moment in the quiet murmur of Laney and Rupert, the higher pitched grumble of Grey denying the existence of mornings the way he had at every camp on route from Rivertown. She smiled, and got to her feet.  
“C'mon, pip, the sun’s not going to stop rising because you complain at it.”

Challenge wasn’t home; George had stopped believing in those years before. But she had helped build these walls, planned the layout of streets, and fought four sieges in its defence. The gates closed behind them and she felt safer than she had since they set out from Bea’s cosy hearth side. She signed herself up for watch duty, running absent fingertips over familiar names carved in rough wood as she stared out. Liam spent much of his time either pouring fire into protections or in the infirmary, pouring it into people.

Rupert helped in the infirmary too. Rosie was just about prepared to let a ramshackle League in, with George and Liam both vouching for them, but she wasn’t about to let an Academy hero into her planning sessions quite yet. Doc Frederickson was always happy to have another set of hands to roll bandages and check the stores, even if he grumbled and rolled his eyes at them. Rupert knew little beyond basic field first aid and odd bits he’d picked up from Rue over the years, but he could tally jars and calculate required stocks just fine. He could carry water and broth - he could hold shaking hands and speak quietly, offer comfort without thought. 

It took them two days to realise what he was doing. The mages were stable but broken, in infirmary beds if unlucky, covering their dripping hands with gloves if fortunate enough to have been rescued earlier. They lived in stasis, though they didn’t know who to thank. Rupert held leaking fingers and wanted them to be better, and they were. George’s breath caught in her throat when Laney ran up to the wall to tell her. Liam had gone frozen in the infirmary even as he croaked out that George should be told, eyes stuck on a miracle he’d given up dreaming of.

Grey went quiet, cold. He thought of his sister, who he hadn’t managed to slip out to see yet, and of what this would mean to the family business. Sarge walked into him in the street and went furious, familiar with the face peering at him through overgrown hair, and was slammed into a wall with a sloppy glob of gold. 

After the mine went up, Sarge tried to tell George, and she blinked at him, slow.  
“I know who he is - I’ve known for ages. He’s just a kid who stayed alive.” He spluttered into indignant silence, and she looked at him, steady. “Sarge, he was a _child._ Just because some of us started that young doesn’t mean   everyone else should have, too.”

She considered doing a pointless search for Grey, on the off chance she was wrong and he hadn’t run, but then the rest of the wounded came in without Rupert. Laney was pale, sitting with her back against a wall and heedless of the rubble in her hair. Liam tried to comfort her and flinched when she coolly dismissed him. George bumped his shoulder.   
“Let her be. She needs to think, and she needs to be alone. C'mon, Doc knows where you’re needed.”

George had eyed Thorne cautiously when he found them in Challenge, a battle plan wrapped up and just needing their obedience. She hadn’t offered hers up, not to him. Rupert had taken intel willingly, but had held his back straight under Thorne’s disbelieving stare (and Liam’s delighted grin) and calmly reminded him who was in charge of this League - but Rupert was gone. The stakes had changed.

Spider hadn’t been foolish enough to try to become one of Liam’s informants. The Dragon Slayer was pragmatic, and not a mage. George he might have tried to bargain with, for the sake of as many lives as he could safely let slip away. Liam Jones was known for mercy, forgiveness - but everyone has their limits, and Thorne had agreed that an operative within the keep was too valuable to gamble on the slim chance that the Piper would be prepared to forgive being dragged into a cell to die. 

When Thorne produced an inside agent like a gift, it was a different Jones who slammed him into the wall and put a gun to his jaw. George Jones put a knife to Thorne’s throat - she and Laney had been in enough tight spots together that Laney didn’t twitch towards the sound. Liam blinked, then spun magic from the air to flick from hand to hand, a beautiful, deadly threat. 

It was Grey who vouched for Spider to convince them. George glanced over at him, and nodded, slow. She wasn’t sure that helping Grey escape was, in itself, enough cause for tenuous trust - but Grey was still there, despite the packed bag he had not very successfully hidden beneath a bedroll after the mine disaster. She waited until Laney had stepped back before letting Thorne go. Spider nodded at George cordially.   
“Long time no see, Slayer. I was starting to think you’d retired.”

Thorne paused in the middle of an interrogation as to Spider’s exact relationship with Grey’s sister, and stared. George looked coolly back. Grey snickered, because it would keep Thorne’s attention on the vigilante who’d been under his nose for a year and away from the topic of Grey’s family.

The keep was familiar territory to everyone except Laney, even if Grey had never seen the lower levels and neither vigilante had seen the upper reaches. Liam ran an absent hand over the cell door he’d spent a cold night picking the lock on, and met George’s steady, knowing gaze. She was still so young - he looked at them and felt his heart break again, because they were all just kids. He felt old, at nearing thirty, his baby sister tearing doors open in a methodical search that shrieked frantic desperation if you knew her well enough.

The cells were empty, but Grey muttered about the private labs upstairs. Liam hesitated when they decided to split up, and George nudged him over to join Laney. 

“The two of you destroy all this. We can’t risk the Seeress getting hold of you, Liam, you’re too much of a prize for the machines.” Laney flicked an eyebrow, and George shrugged at her. Liam didn’t know that Grey was a mage, because that hadn’t been their secret to share. George didn’t want to spill his other secret, and tell them that she was pretty sure if Grey was captured they would find it easy to slip in after to rescue him, or that he would mysteriously find a way out himself.

When the ceiling fell, so did Laney. Her leg was broken, and they were running out of time. Liam had two sisters in the keep, and his heart was breaking, because they were both too young for this. They were all to young for this, even him. Laney pushed herself up to sit against the wall, and readied her guns.   
“Go. Don’t worry about me - I’ve got a way out if I need one. Trust me, Liam, I can look after myself.”

They didn’t find Rupert.

Laney joined the quiet branch. Grey settled into the Library like it was a second skin. George went to university, ignoring all of Thorne’s flattery and invitations. If Laney had asked, she might have signed up as well - but Laney would rather never feel golden fire on her fingertips again than be the one to drag George into a life she didn’t want. They shared a flat in St John’s Port, the three of them, and Laney dropped her pack at the foot of the bunk bed when they got the keys, grinning.  
“You want the top bunk this time? I got first dibs before, only fair you get to choose.”

(In a hidden lab, streets away, a boy was writing battlefront dispatches to himself, disguised in the minutiae of Academy bureaucracy)

George fell into a routine at the University, under the familiar mask of Ana Jones, and joined forces with Grey to take over a table, the way they had in the Academy library, their books and papers scattered widely. Even after two years at the Academy, she had still found her hand on the hilt of her knife when someone let a door slam. She had repressed it as a disguise, but as much as she hated the instinct had known she would need it still, had welcomed the reassurance that she was not going soft. She had known she would be going back to the mountains until her war was done. These were instincts she would need.

But now she was done, she was _out_ , a student not a soldier, and her knife was still in her hand quicker than thought. She carved idle patterns on the table to give herself an excuse, and tried to learn how not to grade every sound she heard by what level of threat it was. She found a soup kitchen between her lecture hall and the library to volunteer at, a few weeks in, something to do with her hands and weigh her down. When Wen asked her to run lessons in basic self-defence, she didn’t have to think about it. George had spent a year teaching the stable loft crew, and she remembered the way it felt like work well done. So much of her life had been learning how to fight, but this - teaching people to protect themselves had felt like something other than blood on her hands.

Heather drifted back into her orbit, trading notes and freelance sage guidance for the rough leagues back at the Academy. They curled up in the same cheap cafe around the corner from the lecture hall for lunch, hands waving and conversations jumping from tangent to delighted tangent. Leaf had been booted off of the official teaching roster for ignoring orders to disband, so it was Red’s wry tones she traded news with when trading tips on how to run a successful self-defence class.

Laney was off to the mountains for weeks at a time, tracking down the remnants of the mage trade and meeting her sister in law in out of the way villages. When she was back, she would swing by the library while George was at the soup kitchen to remind Grey to leave on time and eat something. George thought over this for a few weeks, counting the number of times Grey had forgotten to set out at the usual time when she wasn’t there. One evening when she was done at the soup kitchen earlier than usual, she slipped back into the library instead of going straight home. Their shared desk was empty, but Grey’s jumper was still there. She started a slow, methodical search.

The blueprints scattered over the table were horrifyingly familiar. Grey twisted his hands and stormed away, slinking back later with peace offerings and a grudging explanation. George took a shaking breath. She had wanted to be free of this - but Laney had told them about houses without firewood, rooftops that wouldn’t keep the cold out. George had wanted to be free of this, but she had also been waiting for the shoe to drop - she knew, even if she hated it, that you were never free of the legends you made. She pulled up a chair.

On one of George’s soup kitchen days, Wen beckoned her aside and asked her to take a delivery for him. She eyed him a little suspiciously, and he shuffled his feet.  
“Alright, alright…look, I’m not the only soup kitchen round here. There’s a…network, like, and the lady at the centre of it’s been hearing about you. She wants to see you. Don’t worry, she’s fierce, but Marian won’t bite unless you’re a danger to her people.” George blinked, and took the package with careful hands.

When George knocked on the door to Marian’s house, Muchly gathered her up in a bone cracking hug and a cry of delight. The other old members of the Merry Men gathered round to clap her shoulder, and the new faces of Marian’s crew watched curiously. The room fell silent when Marian stepped in, and her face went as soft as it had in years. There were those there who had seen it softer, brighter; there were others who had never seen her eyes so warm.  
“Well, now, I have to say I’d been wondering about this lass with yellow hair who knew her way around a brawl.”  
“Aw, Mari, you missed me.” George was smiling, but the room was crowded, too many faces, so they slipped away to the attic rooms to talk, Much trailing them with tea and soft biscuits warm from the oven.

(Observation #1. He’s smiling like an open book, but those knuckles have callouses you don’t get from kneading bread, solid stance, if it comes to it that’s one for Liam, I’d struggle to do anything non-lethal; #17. He’s been carrying those biscuits since the Woods, even though he was complaining about hunger just yesterday, so that when Robin needed one it would be there; # 89. You’ve had some easy years at last, old friend, a warm seat and a steady center; #89b. These biscuits are still as good as ever)

Laney was cheerfully dismissive of the idea that she was supposed to keep her work quiet and secret even from her housemates, so when Shay assigned her to surveillance on a possibly less than legal gang, she told George what she knew. George flicked her eyebrows up at the address and nodded.   
“You know something.”

“I have friends there. You probably ought to do some actual surveillance so your dear boss doesn’t get suspicious, but they’re not a threat to anyone who isn’t a threat to them first.” Laney nodded me and started figuring out how to out that into convincing words for Shay’s report. She took the draft with her when she went to spy, and casually told Marian she was welcome to read it when she woke tied to a chair.

George swung by and frowned when Much told her Mari was in the middle of an investigation - but a man stumbled through the door before she could go and help Laney explain matters. Much got to his feet, shadowed by a quiet woman with familiar mountain-born features. Laney was free of her bonds before she should have been anyway, and George just nodded at her as she trailed Marian to Shutley’s side. Laney crouched to look closer, and frowned.  
“There’s magic tied up in this. George, Grey knows more about curses -”

Wen’s was full of familiar faces, people she had served up food alongside and people she’d taught to duck a punch. Some of them were helping hedge witches, faced pale but determined. Some of them were lying on makeshift pallets, faces pale and beaded with sweat. There were unfamiliar faces too, amongst the victims and the helpers. George carried water and followed a hedge witch’s instructions to make up a tea with a familiar bitter scent, for soothing throats that had been hacking up cursed bile. Her hands were steady on the knives and bundled leaves; her heart was racing in her chest, fury a painful pulse in her temples.

This curse, or a variant of it, had hooked itself into her soul, once. Once, the boy stubbornly draining himself of power to feed it into Laney’s deft fingers had written this, a gift, an absent experiment to see what he could do with his hidden fire. And here it was - miles from the mountains or the Academy, slipping into the water and poisoning her people (the defenceless, the innocents). She knew Grey hadn’t handed this over to anyone, or Liam - even Liam had learnt not to trust that much, in the years since leaving his golden childhood -  so she could guess how this had found its way to St John’s Port. She wondered when, exactly, Spider had sent this home to Thorne, or if Thorne had simply gone prying himself, once the dust has settled.

“We know,” said George, in a back alley with her knife unnoticed in her hand, and her eyes were on Miz Eliza, not Grey. George was not kind. Maybe Grey had wanted to rest, _deserved_ to rest - but you didn’t get to choose when your war was done.

Laney was snapping, frustrated fury at every moment they couldn’t know Rupert was okay. It had taken some determined negotiating to get Laney to stop bursting through a door none of them could remember opening, measuring attempts in lost hours and the woozy after effects of frenzy wood darts. Her fingers had itched for weeks, while they paced and thought, while George picked through the gaps in her observations (she was missing numbers, sometimes, observations she had made but couldn’t remember. She hoped that one of them, at least, was _he’s alive_ )

But Miz Eliza just seemed vaguely amused, so George let Laney vent her frustrations while she watched. You could learn a lot, from how someone reacted to pressure and accusations. Mostly, George noted the pleased gleam and twitch of Miz Eliza’s lips when Laney mentioned that Thorne was going to burn for this.

 (Observation # 4; the knitted scarf wrapped around Miz Eliza’s throat in defence against the cold sea fog had a familiar pattern and weave. Observation #5; it had been torn, sometime in the past, and mended with stitches not precise enough to be Rupert’s own but in the same colour wool, instead of replaced)

 Miz Eliza slipped in and out of their flat at will, meeting old friends and making careful plans. George dropped by Marian’s house to catch up with old friends and explain about a missing hero. Mari tapped her chin thoughtfully, and slid her eyes sideways towards the staircase.  
“A…forgetting field, you say?” George nodded.  
“Best we can figure - of course, it’s difficult to track an absence, but we’ve tried to come at it from every angle.”

Marian nodded, and went to fetch her latest stray. They peered at each other and shrugged; if they knew each other, neither remembered it.  
“I can get you certain…supplies, that will help with breaking into the Bureau. But in exchange? Take her with you - not that I don’t like her help around here, but there’s nothing we can get a handle on with this except that it must be magical in nature. Sounds like your hunt for your missing friend may be the best chance of breaking it.” George’s lips twisted in a grin, but she didn’t say _aw, Mari, your soft side is showing again_ , because she knew Marian wouldn’t appreciate it, in front of someone she still barely knew.

 Some days, George felt like life in St. John’s Port was just the Academy all over again - Grey’s piles of books and papers merging with hers on a Library table, Heather diverting into fascinating tangents while her hands stayed steady on pipettes, Laney’s soft breathing steady from the second bunk when George laid awake. Gloria called every few days, sometimes to ask for consultation advice for their unofficial little Leagues in Rivertown, but mostly to hear Heather’s voice and nag her about her sleep schedule. She was leaning into it, peace laying uneasy on her battle scarred shoulders, trying so hard to let it blunt the jagged edges of her.

Some days, George felt like this was the Academy all over again - a rest, a retreat, a respite, not a release. Her war was done, except for it’s echoes in the twitch of mountain folk’s shoulders at a flare of gold outside of closed doors, the empty places at hearths and the empty graves to those they couldn’t rescue, the houses Laney spent her spare time in the mountains trying to shore up for winter. There were blueprints scattered over a library table. There was a hero they couldn’t find, a lab (a prison) they had seen but forgotten, lost hours and missing steps, empty space where there should have been a friend.

Rupert broke himself out. His friends weren’t quite mounting an explosive rescue attempt, yet, but they were doing another casual reconnaissance trip - between Miz Eliza, Grey, and George, they were all quite interested in understanding what was going on with the forgettable lab. Laney was more impatient, but she was also outnumbered and reasonably convinced by the idea of having a good plan and solid intel before making a move. Rupert was planning to get out before they did anything, because he didn’t want them to get into any trouble on his behalf - but the best laid plans are easily disrupted when neither side can talk to the other, so they ran into each other in a corridor that didn’t stay empty of foes for long.

(They had been scouting the corridors around the lab, and found a gaping hole where Rupert had shattered stone; they had stepped through, and observations clicked back into the waiting spaces in George’s mind - #11. Guards on the inside of the door, not outside - they’re worried about people _getting out_ , not in; #12. There is a very poor prototype of a mage draining machine on that table, so I guess Laney wasn’t the only one to save a few blueprints; #13. _Rupert_. #13b. He doesn’t look pleased to see me, just resigned; #39. Well. That explains why the guards are inside - and faded back away when she stepped back through the broken brickwork, leaving gaps that itched at the back of her mind)

When they limped through the doors to Sally-Anne’s, George’s arm over Laney’s shoulder and Grey’s hand on her leg forming a frantic magical tourniquet and curse blocker, Sez slammed past them and practically bowled Rupert over into the street. George had sent a message down from the mountains before they left, in a chain of discreet hands, to tell Sez what they knew. It had not been a soft message. George didn’t coddle - she told them Rupert was gone, but they thought taken, not dead, and that they were doing everything they could to find him. A few weeks before Miz Eliza turned up in St John’s Port, she had sent a terse warning that they were pretty certain they knew where he was, and that if they were right, the Bureau was shortly going to become like a hornets’ nest that had been kicked.

Sez had grinned, sharp, over the maps and plans George had never seen or been told about but knew were there. Sez had made sure they were prepared for the Bureau. Sally had made sure the spare beds were made up, and the comfiest blanket was ready and waiting for Rupert.

Grey was clinging to her leg, but George’s world was still fading black around her, and she barely noticed being carried awkwardly down the stairs. She woke to the familiarity of a sickroom; she’d helped out, at Challenge, through four sieges and the aftermath of a sixth, at a soup kitchen turned to plague infirmary, in a multitude of back rooms, barns and caves as they patched each other up after skirmishes. She wasn’t surprised to find Laney flicking through reports by her side, but she was surprised to see Grey there too, pale and curled in on himself as they waited to see if she would survive. Grey usually showed concern in piles of books left close at hand and careless chatter, the vulnerability of affection safely hidden beneath waving hands and sarcasm, flicking pages like a shield.

Her leg was gone from the knee down. It was an odd thought, and she probed at it like a loose tooth when she had quiet moments, but she thought she had lived through the loss of worse in the aftermath of a rescue attempt, in the wake of saving a life. She was hobbling by the time Thorne caught up to them, and she limped along behind Sez and Sally as they went to make their claim. Laney hovered by her shoulder, calm and collected, hands held perfectly still because Thorne wasn’t allowed to see her vulnerabilities. George leaned on her crutches and watched a kingdom be claimed in the defiant lift of Sez’s chin and the way Sally-Anne’s feet were planted in the Rivertown mud, solid and certain.

Sez brought the quiet work of hedgewitches to life, and it rose in curtains of gold around them. George did not flinch from that light - Thorne wasn’t allowed to see her old wounds, either. It was beautiful, the steady, slow work of many hands, a thing built with drops of magic whenever they could be spared. But she was glad that the shutters in Sally-Anne’s apartment were thick. George wasn’t sure whether she would be able to sleep without nightmares, with that golden fire behind her eyelids.

George signed herself up to help Red with his adopted trainees in the old warehouse they’d commandeered, once Rue declared her fit for a prosthetic. She wasn’t up to much practical demonstration, but she leaned comfortably against the wall, stump propped up on a crate, and called drills and kept an eye out for people to shove in Leaf’s direction for advice. She signed up for watch duty as well, because she knew how sieges worked, and her eyes were as sharp as ever. In idle moments, when her knife found its way into her hand after an unexpected shout from the street below, she carved words into the low wooden wall around the platform - _we were here_.

Rupert was hard at work on his rememberer, once he’d translated his own code, and George helped with that, too - she’d been told, often, that she didn’t do well with idle hands, and it was true. At a crammed table in Sally-Anne’s, Laney and Grey sniping happily at each other and Rupert sighing pointedly, she felt her shoulders settle. Her handwriting crammed into corners around theirs on scrawled papers was a familiar thing - they had set work on the generator aside, for the time being, in the interests of focusing their resources on the more urgent task.

Miz Eliza looked over their shoulders, but her knowledge of machines lay more in the practical auto-repair field than the design side of things. She settled into a nearby booth to write up her notes from her aborted field work, and to keep an eye on her son that looked vague to the point of non-existence until you noted how often she smiled at nothing, and how often Rupert gave a put-upon, pointed sigh.

Marian’s stray didn’t help much, either. She peered at the diagrams, curious, and discussed how the curse felt from her side of things, but she didn’t seem to have an engineering mind. Wren adopted her instead, when she wasn’t taking shifts on one of the watch towers, to help write lists and schedules, and to keep an eye on Elaine as she ran in three directions at once.

George watched her write up plans, eyes sober as she made murmured suggestions about safeguards and redundancies, and thought _I don_ _’t know who you are, but these aren’t your first days of war_.

There were so many things that none of them knew, then. Things they had been made to forget - holes in their memories, words they could remember but voices that they couldn’t - but it doesn’t always take a curse. George had forgotten, or she had not wanted to think - just because she and Liam had been Jack’s family, didn’t mean they had been all of it. He had left more breaking hearts behind than just theirs.

Leaf worried about all of the Academy kids trapped on the other side of the walls, the stable loft crew. He and Red been mentioning a Terence, offhanded, for months of phone calls, now - but they had never said the second half of that name was _Farris_.

Tessa was small, female, and determined to be brave. She hid so many parts of herself, for the chance of a blue armband and the strength to look after those who needed protecting. Her cousin Jack hadn’t come home to visit in years, but Academy graduates cycled through the Forest Wayhouse regularly. For a while there had been a woman with a silver badge, who lent a delighted Hansel books, and told a rapt Tessa about the Academy. When Beryl-Sue started to talk about what it took to be a hero, slightly patronisingly, Tessa had sniffed.  
“I know about _heroes_. My cousin Lily -”

Her forms came back green; her acceptance was returned blue, along with an apology for a previous clerical error. Hansel’s were edged silver, and they set out together along the same path their cousin had walked, so long ago. Jack had never come home. He hadn’t written, either, and Tessa had seen what that did to the family, so she wrote every few weeks even if she didn’t think she was saying much. She hunted down the stable loft crew, Hansel rolling his eyes and leaving her to it, and felt the breath stolen from her by a girl stepping into the ring like it was a second skin, students parting for her without thought. When Gloria ran her through drills and talked about centres of gravity at their unofficial classes, she occasionally got sidetracked into talking about Ana, and all the fun tricks her friend had known about how to tackle an opponent bigger than you.

Tessa came from a family of heroes; she knew their names, their stories. She knew the name Jack Farris, and the name Beanstalk. This far into a year at the Academy, she knew the name _Giantkiller_ as well.

George didn’t know the name _Terence -_ but she didn’t know the name _Tessa_ either.

Jack had never been good with names; he would tell you every mishap, misdeed, and hilarious mess a cousin had gotten into in their lives, but he rarely remembered to call them anything other than ‘my cousin’, so George had always been vaguely uncertain just how many relatives her best friend actually _had_. She’d figured out a rough estimate based on how much trouble Jack got into and dividing the stories by that. She sincerely hoped this was an underestimate, because if not she wasn’t entirely certain how there was a Forest _left_.

When Leaf said the name _Farris_ with a delighted grin, flicking through a smuggled out Academy report, Red huffed and muttered an aside of _little reckless hellion, like Leaf only smaller and even scrappier, and a hero to boot,_ and George felt herself go still. Laney frowned.

“Didn’t Sarge mention a Farris, in Challenge when we were talking to -” George wasn’t sure what her face was doing, to make Laney trail off when there were people watching to see her be uncertain. She slipped out through the kitchen, ignoring the worried looks as best she could, and pressed her back to the rough brick wall outside. She pressed her forehead to her knees and tried to remember how to breathe in anything other than shaking gasps until the world wasn’t pressing too close on her from every side.

George was up one of the watchtowers when disguised mages struck the wall hard enough to shake her platform, sending her stumbling to the wooden floor, testing their defences. The world was roaring gold fire, and she gasped for breath, crawling for the arrow slot and reaching for her gun. Her breath was still shuddering, caught somewhere deep in her ribs, but she gave a shaky exhale and squeezed the trigger the way Laney had taught them all, out on the Academy grounds one peaceful night. A returning streak of fire melted it out of her hands, and Grey flung his arms wide, stealing waves of incoming fire. His eyes were wide, frightened, furious, where moments before they’d been bright with indignation at a world where a child wasn’t allowed to read.

She pushed herself up and went for her pistol, gasping out a warning as the wall creaked inward like the sky was falling on them. The world was golden fire pouring down on her, even as the sky swam back into view, and her hands were shaking. The long-healed burn on her side itched, and she pushed it to the back of her mind as she rose up to her knees to take aim.

George fell again, and her cheek was pressed to greenish tile - the air was thick with disinfectant and coffee - there was worn wood beneath her cheek and her folded arms - the air was thick with coffee and baking bread - there was a woman with dark hair and mountain born features whose name she knew, cheek pressed to tile, cheek pressed to wood, dark eyes and dark hair and soft, strong hands.

Beatrice the elder sat across from Rupert, gasping from a blow that had not been violent, that had shaken through her like waking to a cold house and an empty bed, clutching at his trembling hands. George knew her name, now, shared half of it, but neither of them were thinking of that.

George shared half of her name, but far away in the mountains was a child who had all of it.

“Bidi”, whispered George, “Grey, tell Lane to get Bea home, now, she shouldn’t wait for this to be done, they have to go -”

Jillit Chu would not know until that evening, when she left with all of the Bureau’s secrets still lying ready on her tongue, but in the mountains Liam dropped his steaming mug to shatter at his feet and Bidi went frozen for three heartbeats before bursting into tears. They wouldn’t have dried on her face before Bea stumbled through a rift to dry them with her sleeve.

The room next to Rupert’s cupboard cell had been a store room the entire time he had been there. In this world, Laney Jones hadn’t brought the Seeress in, quietly, slinking through those plush halls of Grey’s childhood, soon after joining the Bureau.

Weeks before, Laney had not been laid out on the floor, burnt wrists trembling, pointing a gun into a bright light and squeezing the trigger to stop the mayor from methodically removing George’s limbs to break his returned son to obedience. Laney had been laid out, trembling, in the bowels of the keep, leg crushed and hands shaking with pain as she waited for friend or foe to round the corner.

George had been picking the cuffs, nimbly, still too slowly, hearing Liam whispering in the back of her mind and trying not to think about people handing you ways to free yourself, trying not to think about golden fire. Grey had been gasping, trembling, begging his father to stop, _please_ , limp on the polished floor. Spider was tense at the Seeress’ rigid side.

Sandry had promised to always be the scariest thing in the room for Sam. She had promised her brother he never needed to be afraid - and here she was, watching as his fear was flung wide for everyone to see, no power swirling at his fingertips to help him.

Once, Cassandra Graves had had an aunt and an uncle. When Mayor Graves was eighteen, his sister had lain discarded at their brother’s feet, flames spilling from his fingers. His elder brother had not lived ten minutes more.

Grey had screamed, helpless, the Elsewhere still beyond his reach - but George had gotten the second cuff free, the knife from her boot, as gold faded from their vision, and Spider had lunged for the man he had pretended to follow, no longer hiding.

When Samuel Graves was fourteen, his elder sister lay discarded at their father’s feet, gold dripping sluggishly from the weapon clutched in his hands.

Mayor Graves had not lived five minutes in a world that no longer held his daughter.

The siege went on. A few weeks after they all remembered her name, Jill turned up on their collective doorstep with a sharp smile and shoulders squared. They had met before they stood in the rubble of the escaped lab, on one or two occasions. The second time George broke into the hidden lab, Jill had ducked her head immediately back to her work. The fourth (she had gone at irregular intervals, even when she had guessed it would no longer work - to check that the field was still there, to make sure Rupert knew they were still out there, to convince Thorne that they still hadn’t figured out what the gaps in their memories meant), Jill had said nothing when George slipped a stray blueprint down the side of her boot, and let one eyelid drop in a flicker of a wink. The sixth, Jill had put an arm around Rupert’s shoulders and tugged him gently away, eyes soft - an apology, a promise to look after him, that George had forgotten as soon as the guards were done dragging her out of the door.

They’d worked together at Wen’s, too, when the soup kitchen turned plague house - but there had been no time for names, then, so they hadn’t been introduced until George was looking around the dust strewn lab. When they sat Jill down in Sally-Anne’s, George dropped down opposite her and held out a hand. Jill considered her as she shook it, a grip George remembered from their brief meeting in the lab.

“I worked in the mountains, for - a long time. I saw a lot of mages die, but I’ve seen more than a few stable, thanks to you. So. Thank you.” Jill shook her head, but she was curious rather than offended.  
“I didn’t do it for gratitude, you know. And I wasn’t exactly doing it for you.” George shrugged.

“I know. But you did a hard thing. And I know no one asked you to, but it was a hard thing, and a thankless thing. Except now I _am_ thanking you, because it was the right thing, or _a_ right thing, what you did.” She tucked her hands back into her pockets and sat back. “And I’m sorry, for whatever you cut away to do it.”

They compared lists over fried fish, Laney producing paperwork like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat when they told her what they needed. Some of Jill’s rescues had been George’s, first, so she packed her bag. She had been telling herself she was out, but she had known she wasn’t, really, with Rupert still missing, with cold homes that weren’t ready for winter, and empty spaces where there should have been people. But Rupert was sitting next to her, solemn and steady, their bloodless generator had come to humming life in the attic across from Sally-Anne’s - and this felt like it could be the end, finally.

Laney ported them out to skies that were as familiar as breathing, and to ones that none of them recognised. George scrawled constellations on the pages of Jill’s notebook, and opened her eyes wide at every new horizon they met. They left people staring at their fingertips, no longer leaking gold, or left flowers at the graves of those for whom they had done everything they could, once. Sometimes, while Rupert held hands and spoke softly, George slipped back out of doorways to breathe.

She had to do this; she had to be there, to walk these paths. But she didn’t have to watch Rupert save lives with the memory of all the lives that hadn’t made it ringing in her mind, if it was hurting her. She didn’t have to stay, and she breathed deep gulps of air that tasted like salt, or gritty with sand, or crisp the way the skies of her childhood had been, and reminded herself of that - this was a choice, not an obligation.

George had never known Winston. If he had been on Bea’s radar, a missing soul stolen by something none of them had yet put a name to, George didn’t know of him. But the quiet branch had, so Laney took them to tell his family, years after the fact, that their boy was never coming home. Jill had a letter, crumpled and worn, a time capsule from a younger woman facing a hard, cold future, and there were tears on her cheeks that had been waiting years to fall. George wrapped her fingers around the thick tea that had been pressed into her hands, while Jill listened to old, treasured stories as though her life depended on it, and thought about another boy who was buried somewhere his family would never see.

When they returned to Rivertown, George let Jill drag her out to market stalls and then introduced her cheerfully to Rue. She sat half the night with a sheet of paper and a pen, before curling up in her old, worn bedroll to try and sleep. There were words buried somewhere in her chest, but she couldn’t seem to dig them out and pin them down in neat lines, apologies and explanations.

The bakery had been off limits, throughout their quiet war; the Seeress had known not to make things too personal, so Bea and Bidi had been in no more danger than any other mother with a child who had fire in her veins (the Seeress had known many things, but not who gave the Giantkiller and his allies their marching orders). But Thorne thought himself invincible, untouchable; so Liam had lain gasping on the floor, everything in him spiralling and twisting, while Thorne held a knife to Bea’s throat.

Help had come, followed by Laney and George. The bakery was ash and burnt timber, and George had dug her nails into her palms. There was no mountain lupin in Bea’s garden, but the scent of it was thick at the back of the Slayer’s throat all the same.

“There’s a Farris, at the Academy in Rivertown.” Bea’s hands stilled on the pan she was cleaning in her aunt’s kitchen. George kept polishing the glass in her hands, eyes down. Liam was curled up with Laney and Bidi by the hearth, teaching his daughter one of the songs the Jones’ siblings had grown up with. His voice cut off sharply (for months, Bidi would break the song in two where there shouldn’t be a pause), and George reached for another glass instead of looking to see what was in his face. “I - I don’t think they know. About Jack.”

She laid her hands on the table in front of her; she thought if she tried to reach for a third glass to dry she would shatter it. The silence stretched on, waiting for her to find her words, to chase them out into the open air. This was the youngest she had felt in years, and she pressed her palms into the wood.  
“I think I have to tell them. I owe him that.”

“Jack would be the first to say you don’t owe him anything, Georgie.” Bea voice was quiet and steady, but soft in the way she only went when she was a breath away from tears. George looked up, and nodded, thinking _but Jack also said he would make it home._ Bea stepped forwards, arms open, eyes knowing, and George folded into them with a gasp. Liam curled his arms around them both, one hand buried in the short cropped curls he’d watched Jack cut for years, the way he had in the graveyard down the road at the funeral of a good man.

But there was a wall between Rivertown and the Academy. There was a war building between them, and they weren’t the ones who got to say when it would start. The second battle for Driftwood Island started, and George went to call their allies to arms. Little John called his volunteers to their feet, and George pressed her back to the rough bark of trees she had slept under for weeks on end, once. Laney handed over her pistols, hands trembling ever so slightly. George took them silently. It had been weeks after the mountains that Laney had confided about her hands, the way they shook when she looked down the barrel of a gun even at a painted target, her handwriting sloppier than it had been since childhood, the knots she had to tie bigger so that her fingers could stumble through patterns they had once danced through. George wasn’t good at comfort, but she had let Laney cry on her shoulder in the quiet dark of their shared room.

Her station was her usual watchtower with Grey, and she pressed her hands to the carved words - _we were here_. She breathed deep, and readied her gun, Laney’s pistols a not unwelcome backup at her sides. There were battles every side of her, but she stayed steady. She had lived through sieges before; she knew where she was supposed to be. Grey ran in chase of a handful of enemies who slipped through a crack in the walls, while George patched it up and hauled herself back up to her station.

The comms spells were a background hubub, until someone said her name, and she listened with half an ear, attention on the stretch of road and walls ahead of her, the part of the Academy courtyard she could mutter reports about for Leaf to direct his teams. Laney took a steady breath, and George held her hands still on her gun, remembering a peaceful Academy evening, a half-circle of faces listening to a sharpshooter teaching them how to aim.

“Do you know how Spider died?”

The Seeress had never made it down to St John’s Port, to a prison she would share with Rupert, to spill Thorne’s secrets into the quiet darkness that to her eyes alone was lit with swirls of endless gold. But Bea had asked, offhanded and careful, and so they knew - there had been no mob. There had been a quiet trail of people slipping into the keep to see the bodies, laid out side by side - the Mayor, the Seeress, and the long-limbed Spider. But no-one had dared cross the threshold until the Bureau told them the news was true, and welcomed them in to reassure themselves that their worst nightmares were gone.

(They knew _now_ \- Thorne had wrapped Bea up in his forgetting curse for several reasons, and one of them had been the suspected secrets of his that lived in her head.

Jill had known, because Thorne had grumpily informed Jeremiah that they were _supposed_ to have had Dadlus but an operative had gone rouge and shot him, so they would have to recreate his work from the scattered notes they’d been able to retrieve. She had thought, briefly, about trying to track down which operative it was by looking through the list of field agents recently lost, but she had secrets of her own more important than someone else’s justice)

George was no stranger to the aftermath of battle, the stink of blood and the way a healer’s face would go still when it was bad. She carried water and bandages, peg clicking evenly on the floor, and she pressed sweetened tea into Weeds’ hands while Rue curled over Red.

“If he can be saved, they will,” she said, instead of _he_ _’ll be okay_ , because she had been on battlefields for years before this, and she had never liked people lying to her to make her feel better. Grey poured fire into Rue’s worst cases, and blinked at his stained hands with a glassy-eyed shock that George had seen on so many faces before. Jill pressed a damp cloth into his hands, her own gaze steady. George wanted to sleep for a year, but she leaned forwards and nudged Grey.

“I had a friend who was a healer, up in the mountains. One of the ones who went with me to find dragons.” Grey blinked, tearing his eyes away from the red streaks he was leaving on the towel. “Dragons don’t really do names, the way humans do - they do _descriptions_. They called him _red handed man_ , because he was bandaging up Liam’s arm - because he was a healer.” Grey tilted his head, a scholarly light in his eyes that made something in George’s shoulders relax even as she braced herself for questions.

The next time she went to help in the sickbay, Professor Merris was stomping around, scowling eyebrows and a blank stare when George introduced herself as _Ana_. He did a sympathetic double take at her wooden leg, and George shrugged.  
“I’ve done enough adventuring. It’ll get me wherever I need to go.” She let him think she was just careless and putting a brave face on it, and went to carry water between beds and bully some food into Leaf while they waited for Red to wake up properly.

That night, Leaf curled up on Red’s infirmary cot, and Gloria wept on George’s shoulder about Clem, who George had known more from Heather and Gloria’s stories than her own conversations with the boy. Rupert settled down next to her at breakfast the next morning, to ask her to help him inventory damage at the Academy.

George suspected she was supposed to want to flinch at the damage, at another place she had lived destroyed, but this had never been home. She ran a fingertip over the words _dragon bait_ on the doors, and smiled to herself. Wherever you go, people carve themselves out onto the nearest surface, their thoughts and names and jokes and declarations - whatever happens next, _we were here_.

An excitable combat spec skidded to a halt by them, a shadow with a silver badge at her back, and George’s feet stilled. Rupert glanced at her, wary. She had asked Leaf, before everything kicked off, if he could arrange a meet for her with the Farris cousins, when things settled. She had seen them in the makeshift infirmary after the walls were taken down, helping Nurse cart supplies down from the Academy and checking in on their friends. She had heard their names, but there had been lives to save, first.

Tessa looked at them, eyes wide. She had heard their names, too.

“You’re _George the Dragon Slayer_. I’ve read - we studied mountain vigilantes last semester, and I’ve hear all about you, you’re a _hero_ and you’re a - you’re the _best_ and Leaf said - Leaf said you wanted to meet _us_?” She was beaming, bright and bursting, and George recognised some of it as desperation for something good to hold onto, in the aftermath of battle, of loses even in victory. “I wrote a _paper_ on you - Hansel helped - well, you and the _Giantkiller_.” Tessa’s eyes flicked to George’s right side, as though she expected to see another figure there too, and George didn’t flinch. Hansel nudged his cousin, and she flushed. “Um. Sorry. Leaf said you wanted to speak to us?”

“I - yes. It’s about - it’s about Jack. He - was one of my best friends.” George swallowed, watching their breath catch at the past tense. “He was my right hand man, too. We fought together for years, him, me and the Piper - Jack the Giantkiller. And I’m sorry, but he isn’t coming home. He saved so many lives, but he died doing it. He was - he was a hero, a real one”

Tessa reached blindly for Hansel’s hand, eyes wide. Rupert hovered, helpless, and George fought not to let her shoulders hunch. Tessa was so very determined to be brave, and here it was, even if she didn’t know it - tears rolling down her cheeks, trusting her cousin-in-arms to catch her if she broke, the way this was too heavy for her shoulders to bear but would be carried anyway. Hansel reached out and clutched her fingers, eyes bright and his chin raised.

“Of course he was. He was a _Farris_.”

Not long after, George woke when the warehouse door eased open and watched Bidi approach through her almost closed lashes. She rolled to her feet at the last moment to swing her up into her arms, grinning. Liam followed his daughter in, laughing, and spread his arms wide.  
“Surprise! We’re going on a road trip.”

Miz Eliza split the driving with Rupert and Bea, and they rotated between vehicles to trade stories - archaeological digs, mountain customs, the different skies they had all walked on, the way the quiet had a texture in the Forest. Tessa and Hansel were a paired set for the entire leg of the journey that took them to the Forest, to tell the rest of the Farris clan that their quiet, fading hopes were futile. One of Laney’s more trusted deputies was going to port out to the Forest in a week’s time, to pick the Farris cousins back up after they’d had some time with their family.

(Tessa wouldn’t be hiding any part of herself, when she came back, except for the way her heart felt shattered, and the voice in her head that wondered if she could have saved anyone, if she’d been just a little bit better. She would try to hide this last from even Hansel, but her cousin would press close to her side while they sat in their shared room, palms wrapped around scalding mugs, every time dark thoughts kept her awake late into the night, and refuse to let her blame herself)

Their convoy went on to the Deserts, to part ways with Miz Eliza and introduce Bidi to the rest of her family. George had submitted her paperwork for the next semester at the University, but she sat curled in an alcove under the stained glass windows, and thought she could love this place - maybe even in it’s entirety. It was tempting - a fresh start, a new sky - but she liked finishing things once she’d started them, and she hadn’t been lying when she’d sternly told Miz Eliza she already had her eye on a supervisor.

Though she _did_ ask Rupert to introduce her, briefly, to a couple of the names his mother had been dropping in a bid to tempt her to stay. After all, she wasn’t opposed to the idea of going on to do a doctorate, and after a few years in St. John’s Port a change of scenery would probably be quite welcome. Rupert grinned, and handed her another parcel of bribes to help distribute.  
“It’s always good to make a strong first impression, Miss Jones. And Dr. Jacques is a _great_ fan of a raspberry tea blend you really don’t get in the markets here.”

They received letters sporadically, as they travelled through the deserts and met up with the Jones family. George traced her fingers over the constellations on the backs and corners of the letters Jill sent her, and stayed up late one night scrawling down maps of the stars. Liam leaned back in the sand next to her and pointed them out, because even if they were the same stars she could see a few days away in Rivertown that didn’t mean they saw the same stories there, and she wrote her replies on the reverse.

On the outskirts of Rivertown, they waved goodbye to all of the Joneses except two. Laney swung Bidi solemnly through the air one last time as George pressed her forehead into the crease of Liam’s shoulder. Bea was smiling, soft, and reached for her hands once again when Liam stepped back.  
“You come visit us, and you write - call when you can, but I know what you’re like once your nose gets into a book.” George wrinkled her nose in a laugh.  
“If you change your mind and decide you need an extra pair of hands with a hammer up there…”  
“We’ll be sure to ask Laney to port that young Leaf up to burn off some energy.” Bea grinned, and Laney snickered. George shook her head, and squeezed Bea’s hands gently before stepping back.

Red and Leaf offered up spare spaces in their little home to returning friends, Grey already curled into a nest in the spare room. George slept under a hedgewitch-made blanket, her bedroll still neatly stowed by her packed bag, for a few days, until she was sure the dust had settled enough for the time being.

The closing of Sally-Anne’s was an end of an era, in many ways. George didn’t dance, but she perched in a corner with Red to laugh at friends, the way they had on so many cheerful evenings, then hopped up to grab a tray and try to convince Sally to sit _down_ for a change. She was surprised but not shocked at the crowd that trailed them out to the porting warehouse, when it was time to go.

Jill had set out on her own travels already, but before she had she’d pressed a folded sheet of notepaper into George’s hand, with an address in St John’s Port, and the location of a market stall who’s owner would know where to find her if Jill’s flat had been reclaimed, or staked out by the Bureau. Rupert passed her a bundle containing his personal collection of volumes on the First League into her hands with a smile, and she hugged it close to her chest. She had scoffed over the First League early in their acquaintance, a long discussion that had been, for the two of them, close to a heated argument. She wasn’t surprised that he had remembered, even if nowadays she already understood what the Leagues had grown from, that she had wanted to read their thoughts for herself.

Laney pressed her hand up against the skin of the world and broke it, the way she had at thirteen, aching for something she could never have. Gold washed over them, and George didn’t flinch from it, even when it curled in lazy drifts around her ankles. Grey was pale even outside the wards, clutching onto Rupert’s steady arm, but he had insisted that he wanted to be there to see her off. Leaf was waving, eyes bright and delighted (Red was smiling at him, fond, if you knew how to look). Gloria was hopping from foot to foot excitedly, a care package clutched in her plump hands.

George settled her pack, and stepped into the Elsewhere, dissolving into fire. Gloria was a bright bubble of intention and a razor sharp attention one one side of her. Laney was all worry and protection, determination strong enough to shatter on the other. Every creature that had died at George’s spear circled her, but there was more to her than their blood on her hands.

 _You save people_ , Jack had said once, earnest and young, a boy who hadn’t yet learnt to fall.

 _I saved myself,_ she thought, stepping out into the fog of St. John’s Port, and breathed deep.


End file.
